Midway

From the threshold of his own fiftieth year, Duncan Bush returns to the Fifties of his youth as a springboard from which to explore the second half of the twentieth century in ways often more autobiographical than anything we've seen from his prizewinning previous collections. A vivid series of viewpoints starts with memories of a post-war Britain, a childhood obsessed with reading and American cinema, and moves forward to less personal experiences and then to married life and fatherhood, middle age, and the view from 'mainland Europe' at the end of the Nineties. In a prose essay, this most committed of individualists also writes of individual and national history; and, in memorable poems, on gardening, landscape, BSE and the crisis in farming, and - compellingly - on the televised funeral of Princess Diana. "One senses behind Bush's best work a feeling of responsibility to the truth as complex and to the creative act as something that involves fact and fiction, myth and history, art and politics" David Kennedy "Duncan Bush creates a resilient dignity from individual acts of endeavour against the obliterating rapids of history" Poetry Wales Duncan Bush was born and brought up in Cardiff, Wales. He was educated at Warwick, Duke and Oxford Universities. His collection Masks (1994) was a PBS Recommendation and Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year. He has also published novels, Glass Shot (Secker) and The Genre of Silence as well as scripts for stage and screen. He currently divides his time between Wales and Europe.